The Complete Strangeness of Joan of Arc
In the last week of April, 1429, as The Hundred Years War enters its final decades, the city of Orleans had been sieged by the English for the better part of six months when a relief force finally appears. Sent by the Dauphin, the army is led by a girl. Hair cropped and face resolute, the slender figure in white armor rides, sword at her side and the banner of God flying above her, through the French countryside.
That image is immediately recognizable. Yet, we have no idea what Joan actually looked like, since no contemporary portrait of her, if one was ever made, survives. We aren’t even sure what year she was born. Probably it was 1412 or 1413, but it may have been as early as 1410. Nor do we even really know how, exactly, she came to be there, where she is known best – leading thousands of men into battle in an era when men were not exactly known to take women’s words for much of anything, much less how and when to die.
One of the most enticing things about history is its interweaving of the familiar and the completely strange – the sense of reaching back to touch a world that is at once, if not known, at least knowable, and at the same time, not. The past is a place as full of lost meaning as a damaged photograph.
The phenomenon of the young woman known as Joan of Arc, patron saint of France and soldiers – what is imagined and attributed to her – is all too familiar. She is the savior who arrives in the nick of time. Tinged with something otherworldly, she performs the impossible before being betrayed, which only makes her more perfect. But the same cannot be said of the person. Or, of how she did what she did.
Joan, who called herself La Pucelle, The Maid – d’Arc, a modern shortening of her father’s name, was only assigned to her in the 19th century – was not from another world. She was, quite definitely, from this one. And in the annals of strange, the story of an illiterate peasant girl marshaling armies and crowning a King of France is, to use the historically accurate phrase, a doozy.
‘I had a daughter, born in lawful marriage. Enemies brought her to trial, condemned her, and put her to death most cruelly by fire.’
So said Joan’s 80 year old mother, in 1455. In many ways, it’s a fair summing up of what we know.
The woman who would become known as Joan of Arc was born in the northeast of France early in the second decade of the 15th century. By that time, the English and French monarchies had been intertwined, often lethally, for 400 years. Since 1340, they had officially been engaged in The Hundred Years War, which neither side could win. If Joan was born in 1413, she came into the world the same year Henry V became King of England, who came as close to ending it as anyone. Until he died. Henry’s premature demise in the summer of 1422, followed a few months later by the death of the French King Charles VI, who had named Henry V as his heir – an act that might have united both countries – triggered the final struggle.
Divided against itself, roughly between North and South, France was once more split between the English and their allies from Burgundy, who backed Henry V’s young son, and the backers of Charles VI’s son, the Dauphin, who had been disinherited by his father but was still seen by many as the true heir to the French throne. The demarcation line was basically the Loire river. The English and their allies controlled everything to the North. The Dauphin controlled most of the river itself and, with a few notable exceptions, everything south of it.
As with all civil wars – which was basically what this was – there were pockets of differing loyalties scattered across the country. The village where Joan was born was one of them. Surrounded by Burgundians and the English, Domremy, tucked into the valley of the Meuse river, held out for The Dauphin. It wasn’t a big place. There wasn’t really enough there to make it worth sacking. But it was attacked in 1425, and again in 1428. The first time, the church was set on fire and the cattle were driven off. The second time, the villagers fled with the clothes on their backs.
Today in Domremy, there is a museum in a house that might have belonged to Joan’s family. Or not. Like so much else about her, it’s hard to be entirely certain. The village church is, however, the same one where she was baptized, and presumably where her parents celebrated their ‘lawful marriage.’ The altar Joan would have prayed in front of is still there. So is the statue of Saint Margaret of Antioch that, sometime when Joan was 12 or 13, began to speak to her.
Being illiterate would not have stopped Joan from knowing what what was going on in the world. News traveled, and when your livestock is driven off and your church burned, even if not to the ground, and you have to flee for your lives – it’s hard to miss. And she was kept well informed by her Voices.
We know this from the testimony Joan gave during the trial for heresy that ended in her death. By the time she reached her mid-teens, she frequently heard not only Margaret of Antioch, but also Catherine of Alexandria and the Archangel Michael. It was as a sign of her obedience and devotion to them that she vowed always to remain a virgin, La Pucelle, The Maid. The announcement caused problems when Joan refused the marriage her parents had planned for her, and were promptly sued by the boy’s family for breach of promise. The episode probably didn’t make her popular at home. But it was indicative. In an age when women did as they were told, Joan did as she was told by her Voices.
This was the state of things in October 1428, when the English and Burgundian alliance attacked the city of Orleans.
Straddling the northernmost point of The Loire, Orleans was strategically, and symbolically, vital. Even today, the river is very wide at that point, and notoriously difficult to cross. If they breached it, the Anglo Burgundian forces would flood into the south, and The Dauphin would be in trouble
Unable to actually take the city, and certain that winter would do the work for them, the English and Burgundian forces settled in for a long siege. They could hold out for months. Inside the walls, Orleans would starve, and eventually, surrender. Already, by Christmas things were not looking good. Uncertain of what to do, because he was uncertain of everything, The Dauphin dithered.
Joan did not. Her voices left her in no doubt as to what she should do about Orleans. It was God’s will that she lead an army to liberate the city. Then, having done that, she should take the Dauphin straight to the traditional site of French coronations in Reims, which was also held by the English and Burgundians, and have him crowned King.
So far, so not-very-out-of-the-ordinary. The middle ages were filled with visionaries and prophets. In a deeply religious world where death was present and its agents active, be it by plague, war, starvation, or accident, all sorts of people prophesized all sorts of things. Conversations with the divine were frequent. A group of children were so convinced of their instructions from God that they launched their own crusade to free Jerusalem. Holy men and visionary nuns were, if not a dime a dozen, not all that unusual. Normally, after the novelty, or shock value if there was any, wore off, they went back to where they’d come from largely unnoticed
This is where Joan’s story departs from virtually everything that had gone before. Somehow, in the winter of 1428-29, in a deeply male world that ran on social connection and hierarchy, an illiterate teen-aged girl with from the middle of nowhere with no connections to anyone who mattered, not only got the ear of a local nobleman, but persuaded him to give her an armed escort to ride 500 miles across France to inform the Dauphin that he had to give her an army so she could liberate Orleans, take him to Reims and have him crowned, and generally get on with giving the English a good kicking.
They set off in January, arriving at Chinon in February, 1429.
Extraordinary now, as a ruin, Chinon still towers above the river Vienne. In 1429, it had already been a favorite royal residence for a couple of hundred years, and must have been magnificent. Certainly, it would have been unlike anything a girl from Domremy had ever seen. Not that Joan was cowed.
Mostly she was impatient. The Dauphin kept her waiting, possibly for weeks. The town today still looks much as it must have while Joan spent money she almost certainly didn’t have, put up at an Inn kicking her heels and listening to her voices while The Dauphin, whom she couldn’t even get a glimpse of, sat up in his castle and dithered.
When he did finally decide to allow her into his presence, he also decided to amuse himself. Before Joan was at last to be led in to the great audience hall, The Dauphin came down off his throne and ordering an appropriately dressed courtier to sit in his place, slithered to the back of the crowd to watch this peasant girl make an idiot of herself.
Whether Joan had cut her hair off and put on men’s clothes by this time, it’s hard to know for sure. Certainly, her reputation would have proceeded her. Terminally bored and always pleased by novelty, the Dauphin’s entire court would have turned out to give her the once over. Now they could also look forward to having a laugh at her expense as she threw herself on her knees and vowed to crown the wrong person.
The expectation must have been palpable as the great doors swung open, and Joan stepped in to the hall. But if the crowd was expecting to be amused by yet another raving mystic, they were disappointed. As she began to approach the throne, Joan stopped. She paused a moment, then, without saying anything, she turned to survey the crowd. A moment later, she began to shoulder her way through the throng of hangers on, and courtiers, and stewards. Singling out the by now speechless Dauphin, Joan, la Pucelle knelt before him. Then, as the stunned crowd hushed, she told him what it was that God required him, and her, to do.
The rest, as they say, is History. By mid-April, Joan was on her way to Orleans. The army was actually commanded by The Dauphin’s cousin, but she rode beside him. By now, she was definitely in armor, with a sword in one hand and her pennant clutched in the other. The English and their allies knew she was coming. She had dictated a letter, and had it sent, giving them fair warning.
King of England, and you, Duke of Bedford, who call yourself regent of the kingdom
of France…acknowledge the summons of the King of Heaven and render up to The Maid
the keys of all the towns you have here taken…And you, archers, companions of war, men
at arms and others who are before the town of Orleans, go away into your own country, by God:
and if you do not do so, expect news of The Maid, who will come to see you shortly to your
very great injury. King of England, if you do not do so, I am chief of war, and in whatever place I reach your people in France, I will make them quit it nilly-willy. And if they will not obey, I will have them all slain –
If not particularly saintly, the message was certainly clear. The English and their allies ignored it. On April 28th, Joan arrived in Orleans. By May 8th, the city was liberated.
Three more cities along the Loire fell in fast succession through June. True to Joan’s word, at Jargeau, most of the English taken prisoner were massacred. At Patay, the Anglo-Burgundian troops were caught retreating. By the time The Maid was finished, 2,000 of them lay dead on the field. In early July, Joan and The Dauphin, now at the head of an army of some 12,000, skirted Paris, making for Reims where every French king since Clovis had been crowned.
If they expected a fight, but they didn’t get one. This time, the English and Burgundians melted away as if commanded by God. Joan entered Reims unopposed. There, on the 17th of July 1429, barely seven months after she had left Domremy, she saw The Dauphin become King Charles VII of France.
Perhaps it is not surprising that the moment of her greatest triumph was also the beginning of the end. Charles VII, who had been a world class ditherer as Dauphin, was altogether more decisive as King. What was now his country was divided and ravaged by more than eight decades of war. It was true that the enemy had, as Joan promised, been given a very great injury, and perhaps as a result, there were cracks in the Anglo-Burgundian alliance. Now, Charles decided that if he could exploit them, he would take back territory by diplomacy instead of by the sword. Joan disagreed. By all accounts, vehemently. But Charles was King. He disbanded the army. And as the fighting season of 1430 opened, he refused to raise another one.
Not that there wasn’t fighting. The wave of a wand, or a crown, doesn’t end a war like this. And besides, the English weren’t feeling friendly. Bands of troops ranged across the country. Skirmishes, and sometimes worse, broke out regularly. Joan was deployed to deal with a number of them, and led an abortive effort to take Paris. In May, 1430, as the Burgundians attacked Compiegne, she rushed to the city’s aid.
By the afternoon of May 23rd, it was obvious that things were going downhill. The Burgundians were fighting like hornets. Joan commanded a rear-guard action, covering the French troops so they could retreat to safety inside the city walls. Which they did, locking the gates behind them. Trapped outside, Joan fought on, until she was backed into a boggy field, where her horse slipped, and she was grabbed by her cloak, and pulled off, and taken prisoner.
What happened next was tawdry. Neither Charles VII, nor any other French powers rode, or fought, their way to Joan’s rescue. Instead, she was quickly removed and locked up while a great deal of haggling went on over who should have her.
The choices were, essentially, The Burgundians, The English, or The Church. The first two were obvious enemies. The third more surprising. Or perhaps not. The French Bishops were not at all happy that their authority had been usurped by a girl who wore men’s clothing and claimed a direct line to God. If the English were itching to proclaim Joan a witch so they could do some face-saving and discredit Charles VII’s legitimacy in the process, the French Bishops wanted to hand her over to the Holy Inquisition. The Burgundians, meantime, were playing both sides – still fighting beside the English while carrying on a correspondence with Charles VII on the quiet. Wanting by now to end the war, they weren’t very keen on Joan, either. Although she might have been better off with them. They might at least have sold her to Charles, if he offered anything for her. Which he didn’t.
The Bishops won. Joan was taken to Rouen, tortured, and put on trial for heresy. At the end, exhausted and doubtless terrified, she re-canted, briefly. Then she re-canted the re-canting, and was handed over to the English, who burned her at the stake in front of 10,000 onlookers on May 30, 1431, – a year and one week after she had been captured.
So many people thought that Joan was a demon, or at least a witch, that after she was dead, her body was stripped so the crowd could see that she was merely a woman. Then, when they’d all had a look, the coals were fired again until nothing was left but ashes, that were gathered up and thrown into the Seine.
Twenty four years later, when Charles VII achieved his peace, and gained control of almost all of France and The Hundred Years War finally wound down, he made at least a gesture to Joan’s memory. Insisting her case be re-opened, he made sure the verdict of heresy over-turned. As her mother pointed out, it was a bit late, at least for Joan. But it made Charles feel more legitimate, which may have been the real point, and possibly salved his conscience, and after that The Maid was more or less forgotten. Relegated to folk history, she wasn’t talked about much, until The Romantics came along, and then the 19th century, and nationalism, and the cult of Joan of Arc was born.
Joan was beatified, the first step to sainthood, in 1909. During the First World war, she became incredibly important to French soldiers in the trenches, many of whom claimed to have seen her. In 1920, she was canonized.
Before and since, endless pages have been written about the girl who called herself The Maid. You can read almost anything you want about, and into, Joan of Arc. But exactly how she managed to do what she did will always be a mystery – a damaged photograph. One of the strangenesses of History. Perhaps she was just lucky. Perhaps she was believed in because she came at a time when people needed to believe.
In Rouen, a sixty-five foot cross marks the place where she was burned. Next to it, there is a modern church, built to replace one which was bombed in 1944. On the wall of its entrance porch Andre Malraux’s dedication to Joan is engraved. From one veteran of Resistance to another, it is both more eloquent, and more accurate than most.
JEANNE SANS SEPULCHRE ET SANS PORTRAIT, TOI QUI SAVAIS QUE LE TOMBEAU DES HEROS EST LE COEUR DES VIVANTS.
Joan without a grave and without a portrait, You who know that the tomb of heroes is the heart of the living.